
To SENKATA and to my dead
Sharoll Fernandez Siñani
This is a trilingual poetic journey that transmutes memory and grief, to a living ritual of presence, braids Aymara, Spanish and English verse and honors the 2019 Senkata massacre. It celebrates ancestral Love.
All procedes support education: 25% of every sale going to Pluma Poética del Arte
in the Bronx, and the remainder funds programs at Fundación Zera Bolivia.
FROM THE CENTER
Sharoll Fernandez Siñani
”Body and word: / Illumination”. Keep these verses in mind when you open this book. In the feat of undertaking a trilingual poetry book in dance with the visual series “Creation”, Sharoll Fernandez-Siñani has produced a great work of versification of the poetic word.Two body images are central: the grandmother, from longing, and the father, from the pain of loss. Both are absent bodies from the material world, beings resurrected by the lyrical self in the verses. Such is the spiritual work of the tongue: enlightening the ancestor, by turning their absent body into a poetic word. Hence, the verse is not only poetry, it is also prayer, meditation, rhythmic mantra for the gods.Words also appear from everyday life (another place of longing). The verses are smells and flavors: ginger, turmeric, chocolate, eucalyptus, cinnamon, and nutmeg. They are a mountain landscape and high plateau in its center from the purest mythical Aymarity. It is a poetics of the language itself in its double sense: that which is born from language, that which comes from the palate.This work does not remain in the intimate plane of the self; it goes beyond and reminds us of the colonial wound of the imposed language. Fernandez-Siñani faces the impossibility of talking about “grandmother’s stories” in their pure form, since they have been upset by the Spanish imposed on the words. The trilingualism of the poetry book is therefore an avid gesture of response. By poetizing from an original language, an imposed one and a cospomopolitan one, poetic creation is faced from three challenging edges for the Latin American and universal language.
